Agate
by scillio
Summary: Volcanic & metamorphic. Caroline Curtis is on the move.
1. Chapter 1

March 5th, 1965

" _Where is she?_ "

The front door slammed. For a second I couldn't hear anything. I guess he was waiting to see if I would volunteer myself for slaughter.

That's the thing I love most about Darrel: he's secretly an optimist.

"This is your worst idea," said Soda, who was sitting directly above me, "in a history of some pretty bad ideas."

"Shut up, perv." There were so many girlie mags under his bed I might I felt like I was in some dumb ironic hippie art show about the pointlessness of consumerism. The one closest to me had a girl with a red bouffant on the cover who was licking her lips suggestively, which made sense, I guess, but she was also leaning against a statue that was wearing football pads, which was beyond me. Unless they were trying to make the point that football is stupid.

King Football himself thundered into the room at just that moment, and he had not bothered to take off his workboots, which were all I could currently see of him. I chalked that down mentally for the next time he told me to take my damn shoes off in the house.

"Where is she?" he snapped at Soda, which he knew wouldn't work. There's no surer way to make Soda balk than to snarl at him, but Darrel lacks patience in moments of high emotion.

Newspaper rustled overhead. "Am I my sister's keeper?"

I could _hear_ Darry rolling his eyes. "Fine. Where's Pony?"

"Bowling alley with Johnny," said Soda, "so I doubt he knows either. What'd she do?"

"Don't bullshit me. I know she was here. Where'd she go?"

"She didn't say."

"Christ, Soda!"

"Language," Soda said flatly. Darry thundered back down the hall, and a moment later the front door slammed again.

I shimmied out from under the bedframe, shredding magazine pages that clung to me as I went.

"Hey look, there was a monster under there after all," Soda said as I emerged.

"Very funny, Hefner. Maybe the real monster is commercial sexualization to pacify the masses, you ever think about that?"

"Oh, all the time." He grinned at me and nodded toward the door. "You fixin' to get your head torn off?"

"We'll see, I guess." I meant to do a little head-tearing of my own, when the time came, but I wasn't ready to go toe to toe with Darry yet. I had to get organized first.

"I still don't get why you don't just lay low for a while," said Soda. He was sitting against the wall with the newspaper in his lap, and when I turned to look at him he didn't look up. "Let him cool off."

Soda never was one for a shouting match. He wanted me to apologize, but I hadn't technically done anything wrong and I wasn't about to pretend I had.

"I'm throwing him off the trail. I told you, I have a plan."

"Is the plan for Two-bit to bring you money?"

Yes.

" _No_ ," I snapped, and grabbed a sweater off the top of his dresser. It was freezing in the house, especially since we tried to keep the heat off unless Pony was home. "What are you reading the paper for?"

He was really reading it, not just thumbing through the sports pages.

"No reason," he lied. Soda's a great liar. It's the pretty-boy charm. People will believe anything if you're good-looking.

I went into my mom's old bedroom and changed out of my school skirt and into a pair of her old slacks. Darry was on a real tear, he was hardly ever home from work before five thirty. It caught me off guard when the truck pulled up, or I would have hid under my own bed where the only magazines were Woman's Day and Vogue.

"What are you gettin' up to tonight?" I called over to Soda. Friday nights for him were usually about five hours in front of a mirror, and then two or three with Mary Alice Ayers. It was hard to tell which he found more interesting.

"Me and Stevie are going out. You gonna hide out over at the Randles?"

There was a tinge of hope in that question that almost made me feel bad. "Hell no. What's Ayers up to?"

"Don't know, don't care."

I stopped in the doorway of his room on my way to the kitchen. "Ah, the paper mystery solved. So which lonely hearts club do you think you'll join?"

Soda pitched a pillow at my head. "Can it."

I caught it and tossed it back. I wasn't too worried about hurting his feelings. They hadn't been serious. "You alright, though?"

Soda rolled his eyes. "Don't you have your own business to worry about?"

Well. He had a point. I'd told Two-Bit to meet me at the house, but that was before I knew that Darry was going to book it home from work. I jogged into the kitchen and called his house with the intention of warning him off, but nobody answered.

Two-Bit told me at lunch that he was taking Sharon Tovino home after school, so there was a good chance he was over at the Sun Diner at that very moment, blowing straw papers at waitresses and trying to joke his way down Sharon's blouse. If Darry skipped the Randle's- and he sounded pissed enough to go looking for me there in person- chances were he'd burn over to the diner next. _Shit_.

I shrugged my father's old flannel hunting jacket on, went out the back, and cut across the Borley's yard to get to Trenton. Knocking on the Mathew's door was a long shot, but I felt obligated to try. Chances were pretty good that Darrel and Two-Bit would collide somewhere in the next hour, which would be bad for Two-Bit, although there was a slim chance it might work out better for me if Darry had the opportunity to blow some steam before we went at it. There was a much fatter chance that Two-Bit would make my brother so angry that his heart would implode, and then _I_ would be responsible for raising two teenage boys into functional members of society, and the hell with that.

I paused on the sidewalk in front of the Mathews' to break off some of the little ice edges that had formed around the dirty patches of snow in the yard with the toe of my shoe. The Mathews' place looked awful in the winter, with huge brown bushes all pressed up against the house like cows trying to huddle into a shed. In the summer, though, it was all white rhodendrons and pink roses.

I made my way around back, stepping in snow patches to keep out of the mud. We never went in the front door. It always jammed.

Two-Bit was sitting on the steps of the back porch, drinking his after-school beer and smoking a cigarette. When he saw me he took the cigarette out of his mouth and did a slow once-over, then put his elbows up on the step behind him and blew smoke in my direction.

"Sorry, mister, no free meals here. Try the Methodists."

I gave him the finger. "Don't you answer your phone?"

"I said I'd be over," he said flatly, and stubbed his cigarette out.

I climbed up the steps and sat down on the broken-down couch behind him to glare at his back. I could tell that he was in a mood, and if I'd had more patience I might have been sympathetic, but I had bigger problems than missing out on a chance to feel up Sharon Tovino.

"What's the matter?" I asked, just to get the conversation started. He didn't answer. "Sharon go home with Bill Kempsky?"

Two-Bit twisted around to stare at me. "Shit, word travels fast. What are you, the gossip columnist of Will Rogers?"

"Nah, you retain your title. They're in my history class. They've been sniffin' around each other like a couple of dogs in heat for a month."

Two-Bit made a face that was half incredulity and half disgust. " _Kempsky_?"

So that's what had him pissed. Well, I couldn't blame him. Bill Kempsky was one of the soc contingent who was never going to make it into the inner circle and was never going to stop trying. If that wasn't bad enough by itself, he was whiney. What Sharon thought she was doing was beyond me.

"I wouldn't of believed it either. But, to quote Emily Dickinson, the fur burger wants what it wants."

Two-Bit spit a mouthful beer onto the steps, coughed, and pitched over sideways laughing. If there's a surer way to get him out of a mood than desecrating a famous quotation, I don't want to know what it is.

Juvenile, maybe, but it worked. Also it gave me a chance to say fur burger out loud, a term I had recently discovered and found equal parts amusing and digusting.

"Brother, have you got a mouth on you," he said when he sat back up. "It's a wonder your teeth haven't rotted out."

I clacked them at him. He turned around to face the yard again, shaking his head. The back of his head was a complicated set of swirls, the grease making his hair look darker than it was. I closed my eyes and started to tilt my head back, and then changed my mind before my hair touched the couch cushion. That couch had been on the back porch for longer than I'd been alive, and who knew what all germs it had collected over the years.

We sat there in silence for a minute, not looking at each other. He was trying to make me ask for the money. That was Two-Bit all over. He would stick his neck out to help me in a heartbeat, and he'd beat the hell out of any guy who so much as looked at me wrong, the same as Darry or Soda. I would trust him with my life. But when there wasn't any real danger, when there was time to do it- I don't know, it was like he had to have his little power trip. He liked girls to ask him for things more than once. He liked for them- _us-_ to bat eyelashes and pout and cajole.

Two months before, I might have done it. I might have pouted at him and cocked my hip out to the side and felt that little rush of pride you get when you flirt a boy into doing something for you.

Two months before, I wouldn't have needed the money.

I got up and walked into the house without another word. Two-Bit's kid sister, Kelly, was at the kitchen table cutting out paper dolls.

She wrinkled her nose at me. "Did you come to babysit? Mama said I could stay by myself because she'll be home at five and it's not that long."

"Doesn't anybody in this house answer the phone?" I shuffled through some papers on the table, even though I knew it wouldn't be there. "No, I didn't come to babysit. Did you have a snack?"

She was always starving right after school. She nodded, too busy concentrating on cutting around a foot to answer.

I ran upstairs to Two-Bit's room and waded through the piles of clothes on the floor to his closet, where he always kept stuff he wanted to hide. I didn't particularly want to feel around inside his old sneakers, but needs must when the devil drives, I guess. I found the roll of bills in the toe of a dilapidated tennis shoe.

I took a minute to count it and my heart started speeding up, which made me feel dumb as hell. It wasn't like I was doing something wrong. It was my money, I just hadn't been able to collect it the night before. It was also a lot of money, but that was no reason to feel shakey all of the sudden.

Two-Bit was coming up the stairs when I started down them. I stopped a step above him so that we were the same height. His eyes were a little too bleary for just one beer- I knew sometimes he took a hip flask to school with him, but he hadn't seemed too juiced up when I'd spoken to him earlier in the day.

"You that tore up over Sharon?" I asked, indicating his general demeanor.

Two-Bit leaned against the wall and nodded at the jacket I was still wearing.

"That your dad's coat?"

"It's the warmest one," I said, like I had to justify myself. I didn't mention that his other coat still smelled like his aftershave and this one only smelled like wool. I was trying not to think about that.

"Gotta keep warm when you're out wasting ducks," he said with a small grin, but it fell flat. I leaned against the railing and just waited.

"We can't do it again, you know," he said finally, while staring at the wallpaper. Lord, you would think we were two old married people having a torrid affair.

"Who said anything about doing it again? It's not like it was a lifelong dream of mine in the first place."

"Yeah, I know," Two-Bit said, still looking at the wall. "I didn't mean..."

He trailed off. He was acting weird enough that I started to get uncomfortable. Not like I was afraid of him or anything, just that it seemed like maybe he was actually upset about the night before, and I didn't want to dig through all the five hundred reasons why.

I stuck my hands in my pockets and said, "Anyway, Darrel came stompin' in about twenty minutes ago. I reckon his work buddy told him-"

Two-Bit tilted his head back and smacked his open hand against the wall. "That fucker. I figured. Shit, what's a man with a roofin' job doing on a Thursday night-"

I started past him down the stairs. "Tell it to the wind, Two-Bit. Lord knows I've heard it enough. Don't sweat it about King Football. I'll talk him around."

"Around to what? Murder?"

I gave him the finger without looking back. He started down the stairs after me.

"You're just gonna make him madder."

"Don't matter if he's madder," I said, and held up the roll of bills. "This is what matters. And he knows it, even if-"

"Hold it," Two-Bit stopped in the middle of the living room and held up his hands. "I think we might be talking about two different people. _I'm_ talking about Darrel Curtis, about six two, dark hair, no sense of humor? You might also recognize him as the guy who's gonna break my head in the next time I see him? I thought the two of you were acquainted, maybe I'm mistaken."

"Ok, fine. But who cares if he blows his top? We didn't technically do anything wrong."

"Last time I checked, Little Miss Technicality, drugging people is kind of on the-"

There was a sharp gasp behind me. I turned to see Kelly standing in the doorway with a mixture of horror and delight on her face.

"You gave somebody _drugs_? Like the bad guy did to Barney?"

I wracked my brain for who Barney was. The Mathews' didn't have any pets. Confused, I turned back toward Two-Bit.

"From _Andy Griffith_ ," he sighed. "Kelly, get the hell-"

I smacked him hard on the arm. "Don't cuss at your sister. No, we didn't give anyone any drugs. We would never do that. We were pretending- just like on Andy Griffith, like how those actors are playing characters and saying words that other people wrote? That's what we were doing. For a play. We-" I met Two-Bit's eyes briefly, "-are rehearsing a play."

Kelly was ten, but she wasn't stupid. She put her hands on her hips and glared skeptically at the two of us. "What play?"

"Hamlet," said Two-Bit, which I strongly suspected was the only play he could name. Evidently Kelly had also heard of it, because her skepticism deepened.

But I was irritated at Two-Bit for that Little Miss Technicality comment and his inablity to leave well enough alone, so I dropped down on the couch and patted the cushion for Kelly to sit down too.

"Why don't we show you? Do your monologue, Two-Bit. You know, the big one."

"What's the big one?" Kelly asked as she sat down beside me. I grinned at Two-Bit, who was practically swelling up on account of all the swearing he was holding in.

"Well Kelly, it's called to be or not to be, and it's one of Shakespeare's greatest accomplishments. One of the best pieces ever written in the history of the world. It's a real honor for an actor to be delivering this particular piece. Go ahead, Keith."

Two-Bit tried to glare at me, but the truth was this was right up his alley and we both knew it. This was exactly the kind of dumb shenigans that lit him up like a candle. He gave up trying to glare, put a foot up on the coffee table, and stretched an arm out dramatically toward us.

"To be, or not to be, is the question," he said. "Which I will proceed to answer."

He paused long enough that I felt compelled to throw him a line.

"Whether," I prompted. He flapped his hand at me dismissively.

"Shut up about the weather, I'm actin' here," he said, and winked at Kelly. "To be or not to be, is the question, which I will proceed to answer. Like a river flows, surely to the sea, darling, so it goes- some things were meant to be."

I clapped. "Ladies and gentlemen; Hambone, Prince of Denmark."

Two-Bit made a sweeping bow.

Kelly laughed, then frowned, then looked up at me. "That didn't-"

"I'll give you a nickel if you go play in your room," said Two-Bit. She lit out before he finished the sentence. You never saw a kid take the stairs so fast.

"She's savin' up for a horse," said Two-Bit. I went through the kitchen and out the back door as he trailed along behind me. "Mom told her she could have one if she built the barn herself, which, _technically_ speaking-"

I shut the screen door in his face before he could follow me out. " _We_ didn't drug anyone. _Dallas_ drugged- speaking of, where is Dallas?"

Two-Bit went over to the refrigerator and started rooting around inside while I stood on the porch and waited for him to answer. I got the feeling he was doing it just be annoying. After a minute he stood up, empty-handed, and turned back to me.

"Last I heard he was slitherin' over towards the bowling alley. Sylvia got a job at the concession stand and he bet Pete Simson that he could make her quit in an hour."

Charming. "You headin' over there?"

"I reckon. Close the door, would you, we ain't runnin' a snow-melting charity."

I didn't have to tell him to warn Dallas about Darry, he'd do that on his own. "Yeah, yeah. Hey, give Pony a ride, will you?"

"Yeah, ok," he said, and then, because he always had to have the last word: "Do us both a favor and stay out of Darry's way."

"Maybe he should stay out of mine," I snapped back over my shoulder, because I always have to have the last word, too.


	2. Chapter 2

March 5th, 1965

* * *

The house was dark and silent and freezing cold when I got back. Soda left a mess in the kitchen for me to clean up, which was typical of him. He knew I hated a messy kitchen. He also probably thought, I griped to myself as I washed up, that I didn't have the heart to put the plate and cup in his bed like mom used to do when we ate by ourselves and left the dishes. I felt bad for thinking that as soon as I thought it, though. Soda's not like that. He wouldn't think that.

I was peeling potatoes for dinner when the front door slammed open- I don't know if you can slam a door open, but Darrel has a knack for the impossible- and then closed again.

"You better be in this house!" He shouted into the dark hallway, which made me laugh out loud.

I put the knife down, turned toward the doorway, and started whistling the Twilight Zone theme. Not two seconds later Darrel thundered in, still in full roofing regalia, and the shock of actually finding me where I was supposed to be struck him momentarily dumb. He gestured furiously for a few seconds, until speech returned.

"What in Sam Hill were you-"

I shaded my eyes with one hand and peered past him. "Well, looky here! Here comes the highest horse in all the land, and who's that astride, why, it's Darrel S. Curtis, rodeo-"

Darry raised his voice to cover mine. "John Reilly comes into work this morning and says hey, saw your kid sister _hustlin' cowboys-_ "

"Ok, that is _not_ an accurate portrayal of-"

"I don't want to hear it!" Darry shouted. Lord, he could be loud when he wanted to. "You-"

The screen door banged and we both looked over to see Ponyboy standing there with a paper sack in his hand, wide-eyed and pale.

He looked back and forth between the two of us. "What's going on?"

"Nothing!" Darry and I snapped at the same time. Pony jumped, and I saw Darry wince slightly at the look of fear that flashed across the kid's face. Pony spooked so easy sometimes it was like dealing with an actual horse.

Darry calibrated. "It's nothing, Pone. You want to run over to Mrs. Mathews for me? She called and said she has some stuff for us."

"Canned peaches and a dress pattern," Pony said quietly, holding up the paper sack. "Two-Bit had it."

I grinned broadly at Darrel as his best excuse to get Pony out of the house so he could rip me a new one went soaring out the window. God bless Keith Mathews.

He ignored me. "You got homework?"

"Some," Pony said. I reached out for the paper bag and he gave it to me.

"Do it in your room while I talk to your sister."

Pony went without protest. He was intimidated by Darry's new role as Head of Household, and he had never been my biggest fan, so I doubted there was much chance that he would try to eavesdrop, but I knew Darry wouldn't want to take that risk. He and Soda- and hell, me too- had warned Pony away from Merrill's operation enough times that he wouldn't want the kid to know what I'd been up to.

Darry knew I knew it, and glared intensely at me in hopes that it would have the same effect as a nice long screaming lecture. And it worked, because I did the same thing I would have done if he was screaming at me: opened the bag to see what dress pattern Mrs. Keith had sent over.

It was a cute little sleeveless with a chelsea collar. I didn't have any yellow fabric, which would have been perfect, but I was sure I could find something cheap and baggy in a bargain basement and cut it up. I set the pattern on the table and took the peaches into the pantry.

"We're not done," Darry said quietly, but no less furiously for that.

I ignored him and started stacking cans on the shelves next to the jars of green beans and tomatoes that my mother and I had canned last summer. There were only two jars of tomatoes left.

I had a sudden image of her in the garden, eating a tomato right off the vine. _Nothing's better than a fresh tomato._ She would laugh when I made a face.

I pushed that thought away. Darrel posted himself in the pantry doorway like a prison guard, and it took all I had not to roll my eyes. I pulled the roll of bills out of my pocket as I set the last jar down and turned toward him, eyebrows up like I had no idea what his problem was.

" _Buck's?"_ he hissed, gripping the doorframe so hard his knuckles turned white.

"Dough," I said, unable to resist the pun. I fanned the bills in his face.

Darry swatted my hand away. "Do you have _any idea-_ "

"Ok, first of all, I took precautions," I began, but then thought the better of it.

"What precautions? You got a Quaalude-sniffing dog hidden in your purse? Jesus, Carrie!"

He paused as if expecting me to actually answer his question. I felt that telling him that my precautions were guilt-tripping Two-Bit into orchestrating who was at the table and paying Dally to play pharmacist would not further the conversation in a helpful way.

"I'll grant you that it was a risk if you'll acknowledge there was a fuckin' reward," I folded my arms and glared at him. "Unless you paid off the funeral between now and this morning."

The mention of the funeral, as always, made him go dead white and shut up. Which made me close my eyes to keep from tearing up.

I hadn't meant to use it like that.

We both took a minute to look at the floor and collect ourselves. Silent agreement, I guess. It was like taking the needle off a record, and I knew in a few seconds we'd start again on the same song.

I leaned back against the shelves and tried not to sigh out loud. "Look, I know, it's awful to talk about it, but-"

"That's not what this is about," Darry said with new fury. "You can't hang around back-alley moonshiners like some two dollar whore. You can't. Mom would of shot you before she let you set foot in Buck's in a full suit of armor, much less a-" he looked me up and down for ammo, but as I was wearing wide-legged 50's slacks and Soda's ratty sweater, he was forced to let that sentence hang unfinished in the air.

"Hobo uniform?" I spread my arms wide and did a little softshoe. Darry snorted, almost smiled, caught himself, and got angrier.

"This isn't a game, and hell's frozen solid if that's what you were wearin' last night," he said furiously, jabbing a finger at me like mom used to do when she was mad. "The creeps in that place do shit to girls that you wouldn't believe! And you probably _wouldn't_ believe, since you think you can just waltz-"

"Save it," I snapped back. Shit I wouldn't believe, my ass. I wasn't about to listen to my brother tell me how to fucking _be a girl._ "It happened. You can't change it. Take the money and send a check to the funeral home."

I threw the bills at his chest, shouldered past him, and went out through the back door. He didn't yell after me, but it wouldn't have mattered if he did.

I was hardly out of the yard before I regretted it, but only because I was damn hungry. I should have walked out after dinner, not before.

I headed for the Randle's, mainly because I didn't have anywhere else to go.

The Randle place and the three houses on either side of it were in the best condition of all the houses in the neighborhood, because Mr. Randle kept all seven of his sons as busy as he feasibly could in what was turning out to be an unsuccessful bid to keep them out of trouble. There is a tight coil of boundless energy that seems to be the Randle birthright. I had once observed four of them spend a blazing July morning rebuilding a porch and the afternoon playing the most violent version of football ever invented. And I have no doubt that they spent that evening raising hell on the ribbon.

Two of the younger ones were wrestling in the front yard as I came up. I could never remember their names, so when they stopped to stare at me I just sort of waved.

"Why are you dressed like that?" said the smaller one, making a face. The bigger one laughed.

I rolled my eyes. "Jesus, already? Ain't you a little young for this shit?" Do boys start judging how girls dress at ten, now?

His face clouded up with confusion and I went past them into the house. Steve's car was out front, so presumably he and Soda were inside, but I didn't care about that. I wanted to see Ronda.

Ronda Randle, the only girl out of all eight kids and the only reason I was still a sane person after the past few months, was burning a complicated pattern into the top of a box when I walked into her bedroom without knocking. She didn't so much as glance up when I walked in.

Ronda had the coolest room of anybody I knew. She'd put contact paper up in her window to make it look like stained glass, and she'd managed to get deep blue shag carpeting from somewhere. All across the ceiling she'd tacked up old black and white movie posters, and her bedspread was a red and purple patchwork that wouldn't have looked good in any other place in the world. She made it all work with little red accents on the dresser and hanging purple scarves on her closet door.

"All on your lonesome, cowboy?" she said by way of greeting.

"How'd you know it was me?"

"Everyone else knocks." Her tight curls were pulled back high on her head, which she almost never did because she thought it was unflattering, but I guess that didn't matter when it came to wood-burning.

Bullshit. "Your brothers knock?"

She held up a long-nailed hand and made a claw. "Yep."

I flopped face-first down on her bed. "What are you making?"

"Birds on a branch. Not what I would have chosen, personally, but Mrs. Burkeholder is convinced that is what her daughter wants."

Ronda was a fantastic artist. Her thing just then was wood burning designs into little wooden jewelry or cufflink boxes and then staining them. Ladies at church often paid her to make one for their kids. I could never figure out how she got her lines so sure and steady with something that didn't allow for erasing, but they always turned out looking great.

She was sitting by the window to let the smoke out, and when she paused briefly to look over at me the wind blew her hair forward. "So, how's life in the criminal underworld?"

Gossip columnist indeed. Two-Bit had evidently been wagging his tongue. "I don't know why you would ask that of me, an innocent forest maiden who has never so much as taken an apple from a stranger."

Ronda laughed. "Hey, if anyone should be making Snow White jokes, it's me. I'm the one who's gotta live with Dopey, Jerky, Surly, Horny, Grouchy, Grumpy, and Loud. How much did you make last night? I didn't even know you could play cards."

"I can't, really. Dallas helped."

"Well there's a first. How'd you swing that?"

"I didn't. Two-Bit did."

"Well, look at you, demurely denying all credit. You're turning into quite the charming young lady."

She laughed, and I laughed too. Ronda had a smart mouth but there was never any malice in it. At least not toward me. We'd known each other our whole lives. We were the same age, we went to the same school, our birthdays were the same month, and we lived on the same street. We couldn't have been enemies if we'd tried. Fate- if not my mother- wouldn't have allowed it.

"How'd things pan out at home?" she asked.

I shrugged. I didn't want to talk about it. I didn't mind fighting with Darry, but what we were fighting about was one of those things that I'd rather not think about, if I could help it.

I couldn't help it. The funeral home kept sending bills.

Just then there was a knocking at the door, and before Ronda could answer Steve pushed it open. "Hey, I need those three bucks you owe me."

"Alright," she said amiably. "I got two, but I'll have to go down and get the third from mom. Hang on. Try not to make out with Carrie while I'm gone."

Steve and I rolled our eyes in unison and she laughed as she sauntered out of the room.

Tragedy is a strange catalyst. My parent's death had changed my relationships with almost every single person I knew. Mostly it was because I just lost the energy to care, but I guess, overall, it did make things more honest in some ways. And more awkward in others.

Before New Years, Steve and I had gotten along fine. He was best friends with my younger brother and I was best friends with his older sister, and everything was just...uneventful. I never minded his bluntness. He never seemed to mind mine.

After the funeral, boy, the two of us couldn't seem to get within yards of each other without striking up a kind of awkwardness that overwhelmed everything in a ten foot radius. It was like we both lost the ability to talk normally. And even if we managed to, it was weird.

To try to offset it, I pushed myself up off the bed and moved over to the window to check out Ronda's work. She'd left the wood burner plugged in. I resisted the urge to touch the tip.

Steve cleared his throat, and like magic, I knew what was going to happen next. I turned my back towards him, but I knew that wouldn't help.

"Your mom wouldn't want-" he started softly. I pivoted.

"Steve," I said, just as softly, "do you know how much a double funeral costs?"

I watched a couple versions of _is that what this is about_ followed by some _but Soda never said_ 's flit across his face until he settled on: "No."

In that no there was an invitation to tell him, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. We never talked about actual money in my family. It was like it was this nebulous, embarrassing thing, too secret and shameful to nail down with real numbers. My parents whispered about it in the kitchen at night. Darry hid bills in his dresser drawer and clammed up if you asked him what we owed. Soda and I had to go in there at the end of January and find out for ourselves.

I didn't want to be like that. It certainly hadn't done us any good so far. I wanted to believe there was nothing wrong about saying _nine hundred and_ _seventy_ _dollars_ out loud, but I just couldn't do it. Maybe partly because I didn't want to think about my dad's work buddy in the doorway saying _i'm sorry, honey, it's the best price we could get._ Maybe partly because it was a literal number representation of how much two human lives cost. Maybe partly because my mouth was filling up with bile.

I spit out the window. Steve winced. I had a sudden image of myself as a cowboy swaggering out of Buck's into the darkness, drunk and bloated and mad as hell. High as a fucking kite.

After a moment of painful silence, he cleared his throat again.

"It's bad, huh?"

I shrugged. "Insurance didn't cover shit, and I want it paid off."

The church took up a collection, but my daddy had burned too many bridges for much good to come of that. Overall we were able to pay about three hundred up front and Darry and I talked the director into giving us a few months to make good on the rest of it, and at the time he was sympathetic- I guess it would be hard not to be in the face of two freshly minted orphans- but one letter came in February and another on the first of March.

 _Burke's Funeral Home and Crematory._ If I had to see that letterhead one more time-

"What are you gonna do?"

I genuinely appreciated that. Two-Bit, Darry, Soda- all of them would have given me the _you know you can't do this again, right,_ spiel and taken five minutes to carefully lay out why hustling the same place twice wouldn't work so that my slow tiny girl brain could understand it. Steve skipped that step. I didn't know or care if it was respect or restraint, but it made me more inclined to answer honestly.

"No fucking idea. Get a job, I reckon."

He started fumbling with his cigarette lighter, flipping it over and and over again in one hand.

"Yeah," he said after a moment.

Silence filled the space between us like water. I could have scooped a handful up and flung it out the window.

Pain- I'll say pain, because I don't want to say _longing,_ because there's something about that word that's so dramatic and raw and awful that I could never bear to apply it to what I was feeling- started filling up my chest, and I knew in a minute or two I was going to have one of those spells where I couldn't breathe slow and my throat felt like it was closing up and my vision started getting narrow. I closed my eyes against it and prayed. _Not here. Not now._

Ronda appeared on the scene just in time. "Hey, wildcats, slow down in here. The party's gettin' too loud," she laughed at her own joke and elbowed Steve out of the way to get her purse off her bureau. "Here's your money, Steven. Now beat it, will you?"

Steve saluted sardonically and shut the door behind him. As soon as he did I stuck my head all the way out the window and tried to breathe as deep as I could. The bare branches of the oak tree next to the house seemed too dark against the sunset. Too skinny and naked and icy cold. How could they stand it? All the whole winter? How could they bear it for so long?

I wanted to reach out and snap off a twig and bring it inside, but that was stupid and pointless and if I could just _breathe_ right-

Suddenly Ronda was beside me with her hand on my back. "You ok? You sick?"

I shook my head. She stayed there, though, and didn't say anything else. She knew about the episodes and all, but I was still embarrassed that it was happening. But it helped that she stayed there and didn't say anything and left her hand on my back.

After another minute I could feel it starting to recede and pulled back inside. "I'm alright now."

"Was it something Steve said? I'll kill him."

"No," I said, and left it at that. I sat down on the edge of her bed and looked down at my beat up tennis shoes.

"Hey," she said after a minute. "You hungry? I could eat a tiger whole."

I'd forgotten how hungry I was. My stomach seemed like it was folding in on itself, and I was feeling so tired just then that all I could do was nod.

"Let's go to the Dingo," said Ronda. "You can borrow my green dress. You wear it better than me anyway. Come on, I could use some fries, and my mom is making her famous egg and cheese casserole for dinner. Let's get out while we can still stand the sight of food, huh?"

"Alright," I said, after another minute. I needed to start applying for jobs, and the Dingo was as good a place as any to start.


	3. Chapter 3

March 5th, 1965

* * *

Ronda's green dress was cute. It was about half the reason I got off the bed, to be honest. It was a scallop pattern sheath with a tie neck collar, and I liked it enough to put up with a pair of her white tights, which I stretched all to hell, and her white flats, which were a size too small.

Ronda kept up a steady stream of chatter while we got ready.

"The other day Gerry came in while I was doing my makeup," she said as she was applying her blush. "And starts giving me shit about girls being vain. Gerry. Gerry who gets up at five in the morning so he can spend a full thirty minutes combing his hair to look like a duck's ass."

"You think this looks ok for pickin' up a job application?" I asked, checking out my ass in the mirror.

"For The Dingo?" If Ronda was surprised, she didn't show it. "Might be too long. Laura Lethbridge runs around that place with both cheeks hangin' out."

"She probably makes better tips that way."

"I reckon," Ronda said, a little coldly. She begrudged me an opportunity to rag on Laura Lethbridge, who flirted with anything that had two legs and a trouser snake, including Ronda's boyfriend.

I layered on mascara while she finished getting dressed, and then we trooped downstairs into the kitchen.

Clara Randle was in the kitchen making pies. Her hair was up in a neat chignon and she had a pink checkered apron on that was covered in flour. If she hadn't been drunk as a skunk it could have been something out of an old Norman Rockwell picture.

She snorted out of the side of her mouth as we came in. "What are you two up to?"

Ronda sidled up next to her and popped an apple slice in her mouth. Side by side, they looked like the same person at different stages of life. Clara Randle was a pretty woman, with the dark curly hair that all the Randle kids inherited, and a mean drunk, which they all inherited as well. Not that any of them were exactly charmers when sober. Ronda was cool, of course, but any of the boys could be lying bleeding to death in an alley and still find something sarcastic to say to the nearest good Samaritan.

"Going to the sock hop and then bible class," Ronda drawled, and then dropped the twang and elbowed her mother gently. "Don't Carrie look cute?"

Clara gave me a once over and pursed her lips. "It's a shame you ain't as pretty as your brother, but you'll do."

That was Clara's way of saying I looked nice. It didn't bother me, by that point I knew to take everything Mrs. Randle said with a pinch of salt. _A spoonful of salt,_ my mother used to say, pursing her lips whenever something Clara said got back to her. _That woman's got a serpent's tongue_.

The thought of my mother made the reply I had ready dry up in my throat, and I said nothing.

"Nice, Ma. Don't listen to her, Carrie, she's just jealous. Y'all look like Tracy Reed when you do your eyes like that."

I didn't look like Tracy Reed anymore than I looked like Dick Tracy, but it made me laugh. Which may have been a mistake, given the audience.

Clara turned on her daughter, floury hands on her hips. "Jealous of what, you little wide-mouthed bitch?"

Yep, great job playing happy family, Ma. Two whole minutes, what a record." Ronda rolled her eyes and grabbed my arm to pull me toward the door. I shook her off. I never liked being grabbed, even if it didn't mean anything.

Clara slammed a pie plate down and a cloud of flour spun out onto the floor.

"Don't you walk out that door dressed like that, Ronda Joan! That short skirt and tall boots, you look like a Christmas elf turned whore!"

Ronda and I burst into laughter as the door banged shut behind us.

"Man, she's a bitch, but she's got some great lines," Ronda said, wiping tears of laughter carefully out of her eyes. "A Christmas elf turned whore. I'm going to use that the next time I see Sylvia."

"I'm sure she'll receive in the true holiday spirit."

"How come you don't do cat eyes more? I'd do it all the time if my eyes weren't so small."

"Too much work," I said, and she laughed. I didn't mean the work of applying the makeup, to tell the truth. The last time I did cat eyes Darry pitched a fit about it making me look older than I was, which was the entire point, but try telling him that. He physically blocked the front door, and as I refused to cede ground by going out the back, the two of us spent the next hour shouting at each other until Soda came out and told us that Pony was in their bedroom with a pillow over his head and if we didn't shut up he was gonna move the both of them into the Mathews' place permanently.

In the end, I'd gone out with cat eyes anyway, but I'd been too angry to do anything other than go to the library and throw myself into a book. It was still a sore point with us. We hadn't talked about it since, and I was too tired of fighting over every other damn thing to worry over eye makeup.

"Are you really gonna apply at The Dingo?"

"Planning on it."

Ronda wrinkled her nose. "Waitressin'? Will Darry let you do that?"

"Ok, _why_ is everyone suddenly acting like my life is a movie and my brother is the director? Darry didn't get bit by a radioactive spider and develop omnipotence, as far as I can-"

Ronda threw her hands up like she was under arrest. "Alright, ok, I retract my statement. Also, radioactive spider?"

"Your brothers don't read Spider-Man?" I said, like _I_ didn't read Spider-Man.

"Other than Steve and Gerry, I'm not entirely sure any of them know how to read. Hell, If Markie and Babe ever got into anything as tame as comic books, my dad would pay them to stay inside."

You had to feel for the youngest Randle. His real name was something like Denny or Danny, but every single member of his family called him Babe, regardless of who they were talking to. I wouldn't be surprised if the name showed up under his yearbook picture.

I rubbed my arms while we walked. Ronda didn't have a car, and neither of her brothers who did were around to give us a ride. If we walked fast we could make it to The Dingo in half an hour or so. Ronda had lent me a cardigan, but the wind cut right through it. Ronda was quiet for a minute. Too quiet, I thought, and when I looked over she was frowning.

"What?" I said, nudging her, though I had a damn good suspicion of what.

Ronda shrugged. "What do you mean, what?"

"Come on, what?"

"Nothing."

"You don't think it's a good idea," I said, wrenching my sleeves down over my hands as the wind picked up.

"I never said that," Ronda said evenly, which was as good as saying it.

"What's wrong with being a waitress?"

"Nothing!"

"What is it, then?"

"Well," Ronda said reluctantly, "it's just that waitresses work on tips, is all. So they have to be all sunny and shit. And you…"

"Yeah," I said. I tried to work up to being offended but, well, she had a point.

"I don't mean it mean. It's just at a place like The Dingo you probably have to put up with a lot of bullshit, too. I don't mean it mean, really I don't, but I don't think it's a good idea. And anyway, how much could Laura be makin', really, even with that skirt she runs around in where you can see clear up to Leavenworth."

I snorted at that. "No, I know. You're right."

As we walked I tried to figure how many cars were there on a given night, but that was impossible. It had to vary pretty wildly. But say thirty or so in about two hours on a Friday night- if each car ordered at least two burgers, and assuming they tipped ten percent, that was three cents a car. And that was assuming the greasers driving tipped at all. _And_ there were two waitresses. Laura Lethbridge wasn't making shit.

A wave of anxious energy was rising up inside me. I tried to dam it back by repeating _there are other jobs, tons of other jobs_ over and over to myself. I felt stupid to be so jumpy. It wasn't like I'd had all my hopes pinned on a job as a waitress. But I couldn't stop the feeling no matter how hard I tried.

"Hey, hot stuff! Need a ride?" a girl shouted, and we looked over to see Darlene McKinnon hanging out of the window of her boyfriend's car as he pulled over to the sidewalk.

Ronda thrust her hip out, twirled her purse like a boa, and said throatily, "I don't know if you can afford us, baby."

"Why not? I got a dime," Darlene said, grinning broadly.

"Sorry, but it's twenty cents to kill your boyfriend, and thirty if you want it to look like an accident."

"Hell of a deal, though." I slung my arm around Ronda's neck. "You won't find better prices this side of the Mississippi."

Darlene rolled her eyes. "I'll keep that in mind. Y'all gettin' in, or what?"

"Where we going?" It didn't matter that much, since Ronda had talked me out of applying to The Dingo.

"Jay's," Darlene's boyfriend, Neil, said as we slid into the back seat. "I'd be obliged if you don't kill me till we get there."

He winked at Ronda in the rearview. She made a point of pretending not to have seen it.

I picked at a chip in my nail polish and said, "Now, Neil, don't take it personal. We're just trying to make our way in the business world, like any respectable citizens."

"Oh yeah, y'all are head of the Good Citizenship Committee," said Darlene. "When's the next meeting? After the Ladies' Aid?"

Ronda tilted her eyebrows at me. " _Sarcasm_?"

"Slander," I gasped.

"Defamation of character."

"We're gonna clean you out in court, Miss McKinnon."

"I'll hold my breath. Hey Ronnie, did you see what happened to Gail in gym?"

Ronda burst into laughter. I watched as her whole face lit up, not really listening to what they were saying, and I saw Neil watching too. I pushed my knees forward into the back of his seat with slowly increasing pressure until he jerked around at a stoplight and glared at me. Ronda and Darlene didn't notice, so I just stared at him until he turned back around.

We pulled in to Jay's just in time to catch the last stages of a fight. The Dingo was way higher than Jay's on the list of restaurants that the police were required to visit regularly, but that was only because Jay never called the police and encouraged us all to view this defining feature as a lodestar for our conduct. The aspiration of every good and righteous human, Jay would say while throwing down baskets of fries so that they scattered over the table, should be to not bite the hands that feed them.

He also kept a shotgun under the register and used it to emphatically request that fights be taken off the property. How far off the property was none of his concern, so there was a lot of fighting done in the grass off to the side of the parking lot. It was a pretty good scene if you were the kind of boy who enjoyed cutting holes in other boys without any chance of adult interference.

As we pulled in there was a tight circle of boys in the grass, and in between their shoulders I could see Tim Shepard's little brother kicking viciously at someone on the ground. Boys surged in to pull him off, and Ronda and Darlene and I got out of the car to head inside as Neil ran over to the crowd.

"Stupid," Darlene said mildly, but whether she meant her boyfriend or fights in general I didn't know.

Right up next to the building two blonde socy girls were leaning on Billy White's car. I recognized one from my American History class. Nancy Masters was pretty and rich and she dressed like it. She was wearing a purple mini-dress with big yellow geometric shapes all over it that was absolutely gorgeous.

"Can you jump somebody for a dress?" I muttered to Ronda, and she laughed for a second, but then just glared. I knew what she was thinking. I was thinking it too, and Darlene threw her shoulders back and put her chin in the air in a pretty solid imitation of an heiress deigning to visit the masses. I laughed, and the socy girls looked over at us. That was all the excuse we needed to stop by their car.

"Well, well, if it ain't the graduating class of Miss Cuthbert's Academy for Perfect Little Angels," said Ronda, and Darlene giggled as she lit a cigarette.

Nancy pursed her lips disdainfully, but the other girl looked ready to spit. She was dressed like an extra on the set of Dobie Gillis and looked about as happy to be there as we were to see her.

I eyed her over slowly. "Trouble over on the South side, girls? Y'all defectin'?

Nancy cut her eyes at me. "We have just as much a right to be here as anyone else."

"Do you, now? I suppose you got a certificate from the chaperone that says so?" said Ronda.

"It's a free country," Nancy said airily, looking pointedly past us.

"My, they do brush up on their political science at Miss Cuthbert's. Were you the valedictorian?" Darlene sneered. The wind kicked up suddenly and blew her hair back off her face. She looked like something out of an old painting just then, with her hair blowing and her eyes hard and angry behind the smirk. Darlene was even poorer than me and Ronda, and she was always having to miss school to take care of her mother's newest baby so her mother could work, and it was like Nancy Masters was rubbing all that in her face when she sat on Billy's shitty car in her eighty dollar dress and acted like she _belonged_ here. This girl already had everything, and now she had to come after our shit too.

Darlene passed me the cigarette and I took a drag and blew smoke in their direction, but the wind took it. "They'll kick her out if she keeps slumming like this," I said casually to Ronda.

Nancy's delicate nose scrunched at me. "I know who you are. Everyone at school says there's something wrong with you."

I put the back of my hand up to my forehead. "Oh, no, anything but that."

"And here you were all set to run for prom king," Ronda added.

"They'll never elect me now. Oh, Nancy, Nancy, whatever shall I do?"

Darlene barked out a laugh at my dramatic gesturing and smiled at Nancy. "Another dream crushed under those expensive heels. What's the matter, Nancy, you run through the whole football team already?"

Nancy only rolled her eyes at that, but the other one sat up straighter and said angrily, "We wouldn't be here if- it's not any of your business what we do. Can't you go make out with some dumb hood?"

"I would, if I could find one you hadn't already rubbed your musk all over," Ronda said coolly, and Darlene and I whooped with laughter. We stumbled on into Jay's, loud, fearless, making a show of how little we cared about anything they or anyone else thought. I could feel Nancy's angry eyes on us all the way through the door, and it made me glad.

But just as we got inside the door a pack of boys rushed out of it, and we turned to see what the big deal was just in time to see Billy White, over in the grass, make a genuine attempt to reduce the number of Shepards in the world by one. Everyone around us shut up and watched as Shepard skirted away, cursing furiously, his voice made louder by the silence of the loose pack of spectators. Everyone shuts up when the knives come out.

I'd known Billy since I was about ten years old, so it shouldn't have come as any kind of surprise to me, but something about seeing that bright line of blood bloom across Tim's brother's- I could never remember his name- collarbone shocked me, like I had never seen blood before, like I had never seen two dumb boys try to cut each other for some dumb reason. But before it had never seemed like someone could actually die, like a whole entire life could just _stop_ like a storm passing, rain and rain and rain and then all the sudden nothing. All the sudden nothing. And suddenly instead of watching Billy lunging forward with his knife out and chest unguarded like he didn't care if his heart got carved right out of him I was seeing a coffin going down into the earth and the heels of my shoes were sinking into the grass. _Gone._

If I shut my eyes I would die. Right in that second I was sure of it. But if I kept them open, if I kept them open-

Ronda's hand squeezed mine. I turned my head toward her and she tried to look at me, but she couldn't stop herself from watching, and slowly, more slowly than it should have taken, I realized that it wasn't just me, that she was afraid too. And I closed my eyes.

When I opened them things felt different. I sat back and watched one boy try to kill another boy, and it didn't feel quite real, even though I had seen more fights at that point in my life than I could count. It felt like a movie that I wasn't particularly interested in. And eventually the other boy backed up enough that he was able to turn around and run, down around the corner of the building and presumably over the fence and into the alley. And Billy stood there and laughed, and Ronda and I went inside and ordered fries.

I didn't start feeling real again until suddenly I did. Suddenly I was in a booth with Ronda, too hot instead of too cold, and there was a coke in front of me. I took a drink.

"Christ, I thought he was going to kill him for real," Ronda said, and I nodded along and looked at her. Her face was deathly - _no not that_ \- her face was sickly pale, and I knew she was not exaggerating.

"Yeah, but he didn't," I said, and my voice was so bored that she looked at me in shock. It shocked me too, but I only took another drink of the coke and looked around to see who all was there that we knew. Everybody. We knew everybody. I looked down at my hands.

"You feel ok?" Ronda said in an undertone.

"Yeah," I said.

She didn't believe me, so she changed the subject. "I got a letter from Dell yesterday. He says everything's going good. He said to say hi."

Ronda's boyfriend was up at Fort Sill learning to fly helicopters. "He know when he ships out yet?"

"No, not yet. Oh, great. Here comes the peanut gallery."

I didn't look. Jay's wasn't a very big restaurant, but it was always kind of chaotic and haphazard with tables all over the place and boys on all the window sills, and it was hard to tell who was coming in and who was going out over the partition by the door. We were in the booths that lined the east wall, and Ronda had a better view of the door than I did. I figured from her tone that it was one of her brothers, and a couple minutes later Steve slid into the booth next to me and Soda bounced down next to Ronda.

"Did you see the fight?" Soda said without preamble.

"Billy about murdered the little Shepard." Ronda sat back and took on an air of complete disinterest. She put a cigarette between her lips and leaned toward Soda expectantly, and he grinned gallantly at her and lit it. Lord, it took all I had not to kick them both. Ronda was about as good as married to Dell, but she liked to flirt with Soda. And Soda had always liked to flirt with everybody, but it had definitely gotten more pronounced in the past few months. It was like he was soaking in attention like a sponge. I wondered if he'd ever get full.

"Quit skeeving on my sister," said Steve, and Ronda kicked at him under the table. "Yeah, we heard Shepard ran for it. There's gonna be some shit going down over that."

"Don't tell me Tim white knights in whenever that little punk gets cut open," I said. "He wouldn't have time for anything else. Hey Ellen, is Jay hiring?"

This last part I directed at Jay's wife, who was setting our baskets of fries on the table. She was a plump woman in her fifties or so, never particularly good tempered, not that I could blame her.

"That's Mr. Jay to you, and who's asking?" said Ellen, like she hadn't gone to the same church as us since we were kids.

"Joan of Arc," I said flatly.

She jabbed a finger at me. "See, that right there is your trouble. No one wants to hire smart-mouthed little girls who can't answer a simple question."

"There's always saving France and getting burned alive for her trouble to fall back on," Ronda called after her, but Ellen just waved a hand and got back to work.

"You'd be better off applying to be a sewage worker," Soda said cheerfully. I ignored him.

"What kind of shit is gonna go down over Billy and Shepard?" I asked Steve.

"Drug shit. Brumly supplies most of what Shepard deals, and literally every Brumly guy is related to Billy somehow. Gonna throw a big fucking wrench in the works. You know why they fought?"

I shrugged. "I don't know. Baby Shep was kicking the hell out of someone when we pulled in."

"Yeah, I heard that," he said, and then didn't say anything else. I couldn't have cared less about the machinations of the Brumly and Shepard outfits, but talking about Billy White made me remember what that other soc girl had said outside- _we wouldn't be here if_ before she cut herself off. I looked around for her and saw her pressed into a chair by the window in the corner, arms crossed, no Nancy or Billy in sight. They were probably out in the car making out. It was dark now. I wondered why she didn't just leave; she certainly wanted to. But then, I guess if Ronda had been stupid enough to date Billy White, I wouldn't have wanted to leave her alone with him either.

More people squeezed into our booth, and Steve left to hit on Bev Newman, and things got louder and wilder as flasks and bottles started coming out. The whole time, the girl sat in the corner by herself, fending off the occasional boy, staring angrily at her own shoes when she could. I watched her for about half an hour, on and off, and as I watched the beginnings of a plan began to take root in my mind.


	4. Chapter 4

March 5th/6th, 1965

* * *

It was the shoes that did it. Dark red pilgrim pumps, just a shade too bright to be called maroon. Real leather.

I climbed over the back of the booth. Fish Richardson whooped as I swung a leg over his head, and I reached back to smack him and got a greasy hand for my trouble.

Jay's didn't have a jukebox, but a radio on the counter was turned all the way up and plenty of people were dancing. I sidled around the edge of the group, pushed my way through an argument between Evie Shumpert and Evie Romero, and slumped into the chair next to Nancy's friend.

"How's your field trip going?" I asked, sticking my foot out to try and trip Jamie Roran as he went by with a girl. He flipped me the bird and I laughed.

Her majesty didn't answer, just glowered. She was shorter than me, and pretty, even with her face folded up in anger. Her hair was a dark blonde with red undertones, and she had it parted too far to the left and too sharply. She would have looked better with bangs.

After a minute I nudged her chair with my foot. "What's the matter, you don't like the music?"

"Leave me alone."

"Aw, but then you'd be all by yourself. Where'd Nancy get to?" I said, like we all didn't know exactly where Nancy'd got to.

She ignored that and stared at the writhing mass of dancers until I spoke again.

"Look, no one's taken you prisoner. Why don't you just leave?"

"Nancy's my ride," she snapped.

"Can't you call your rich daddy?"

"Can't you mind your own business?"

"I'm not known for that. What, mother and pater will forbid you from attending cotillion if they find out where you've been?"

"Shut up." Her voice quavered. "You don't know one damn thing about me."

Great. In another minute she'd be crying. "Maybe not. But I know you want to leave, and your friend don't. I know you came in Billy White's car, and little miss slumlord over there is gettin' her kicks with him, while he brags all over town about rich girl pussy. I know if you're trying to get in his pants too, you're dumber than a box of cocks. I know your mad's wearin' off and you're startin' to look scared, which is about the dumbest damn thing you can do at the moment. Come on, you can't tell me this place is any wilder than what y'all do at the river bottom."

"You're disgusting, you know that?" she snarled, but she was looking mad again, which was better for both of us. For me because I was never any good at dealing with scared people and for her because she was surrounded by a bunch of drunk greasers. I leaned back in my chair and stared at her until she turned fully toward me.

Her eyes were green. A nebula of amber around the pupil, edged by a ring of deep mossy green. Beautiful.

"I don't know what's wrong with you," she said in a tone that meant she very much did know, just was too well bred to say it, "but I just want to be left alone until I can get out of this dump. Is that such a crime? Why do you all have to make a court case out of it?"

"We watch a lot of Perry Mason when you're not around," I drawled. "Jeez, what's with this Nancy chick? She got a magnetic vagina or something? How come you don't just call somebody and leave?"

"What do you care?" she snapped. I caught a hint of desperation. I would have bet my front teeth at that moment that if she didn't hate me more than anything she would have followed it with a melodramatic, _I don't have anyone to call._ I fought down the urge to roll my eyes, because I wanted her to hate me a little less. She was going to have to if the plan I had simmering was going to work.

I figured a girl who could afford those shoes, even if she didn't know how to match them to her outfit, had to have at least thirty bucks in her purse. Maybe more. And maybe a couple of mommy's diamond rings, who the hell knew.

I wished in that moment that I had the guts or lack of compunction or whatever to just take the purse, but I couldn't even think about it, really. Both my parents- my mother out of religion, my father out of pride- had taken great pains to hammer us kids into the kind of brawling, cussing half-hoods who wouldn't steal a thousand dollars if it was presented on a silver platter. Soda wouldn't even help Steve steal hubcaps, the one source of contention in the history of their friendship.

So my rough draft of a plan was to get this girl to use me as her own personal taxi and pay me for it, but the relationship I had been cultivating with her up to that point was not exactly working in my favor. And I was starting to feel pretty stupid just sitting there next to her in silence. But she had paid a hell of a lot of money for those shoes she was wearing, and I was willing to bet she would pay me more to drive her home than I would make in six weeks working at Jay's, so I had to keep trying.

It was Carl Quinn, irony of ironies, who came to my rescue. Carl was a particularly handsome and particularly slimy young man of the Tiber Street set who tended to walk like he was Moses approaching the Red Sea, if Moses had had a narcissistic disorder.

He strutted up and stopped too close to the soc girl, especially considering that she was seated and his crotch was basically in her face. She scooted her chair back until it hit the wall and looked pointedly away from him.

Carl, leering, reached out and tapped her forearm with one finger. "Hey honey, why don't you come and dance?"

"No, thank you," she said icily.

" _No, thank you_ ," Carl mimicked, and grabbed her by the wrist, but she jerked back hard enough to shake him off. That made him laugh.

"You're a little stuck up, huh? Come on, baby, take the stick out of your ass and shake it!"

I leaned forward. "Sorry, you want her to wave a stick at you that just came out of her ass?"

Carl did not welcome this observation. "No one's talkin' to you. I'm here for the _cute_ one, so mind your own business."

"Sure, but you can't go airing out your very specific fetishes and not expect anyone to comment on it, Carl. That's not really how social interactions work."

He went red. Socy put a hand over her mouth to hide a laugh, and Carl looked furiously down at me. I smiled.

"You're a real little-" Carl held off on calling me a bitch long enough to look around and see if any of my brothers were there, spotted Soda, and changed tack. "Whatever. I don't have time to waste on a couple of skuzzy dogs like you two, anyway."

With this devastating display of wit, Carl departed.

The girl scooted her chair forward a little and gave me a vaguely incredulous look.

"Thanks."

"No sweat." I shrugged. "Carl's good-looking, but he's gross as hell."

"The good-looking ones always are," she said, and I laughed, and she grinned, and just like that I was in. Lord, the first and only time Carl Quinn did me a lick of good. It was a miracle.

"I'm Susanna," she offered. When she smiled her whole face lit up.

"Carrie. Look, if you need a ride home, I got a car." It was Steve's car and he didn't know it yet, but that was a minor detail.

"Oh no, I couldn't put you out like that," Susanna said immediately. Genuine, too, not _I can't get in a car with a greasy bully_ and damned if I didn't start to like her a little. I pressed that particular feeling down.

"It's no trouble, really. I'm about done here anyway."

She wavered, chewing on her lower lip and thinking. I figured she was stuck between abandoning Nancy and her desire to get out of there and I couldn't blame her, really; if Ronda was dating Billy White I'd be reluctant to leave her alone with him, too.

But Nancy had already bailed on her, and things were starting to heat up on the dance floor, so Susanna turned to me after a minute and said, "You're sure you don't mind?"

"Yeah," I said. "No problem. Let me just go get my purse."

I dodged back to the table and beckoned for Steve to get up and come talk to me, which of course made all the geniuses he was sitting with start whistling and cat calling. He clambered out and we stood with our backs against the window, too crowded to directly face each other.

"Hey, I'm about to make thirty bucks, but I need a car," I said in his ear. It was too loud to hear, otherwise.

Steven, to his credit, did not ask who I was going to charge thirty dollars for some backseat bingo. He did look extremely hesitant about handing over his keys, but also like he thought I might bite his head off if he asked for details.

"Thirty bucks?" he said, trying to feel me out.

"Playing taxi for a poor little rich girl. It's a good deal, huh?"

"Yeah," he said, and dropped the keys in my hand. It feels stupid, but I was kind of touched by that. By his willingness to just take my word for it and not turn it into a big production.

"Thanks," I said. "I'll take it back to your house then, ok?"

"Sure," he said, and gave me that same look Ronda always had when she wasn't sure about something. And if had been Ronda, I would have pried it out of her. And if it had been anyone else, I would have walked away. But Steve had just given me his car, so I felt obligated to stand there and let him look doubtfully at me for a minute.

Man, it was like the awkwardness between us that afternoon had been lying in wait, like some stupid awkward predator. We never stood a chance. Steve cleared his throat and looked at his shoes while I tried to figure out if it would be worse to inch away- we were standing way too close to not be talking- or if it was better to pretend I couldn't feel the heat of his shoulder against mine.

"Look," he said finally.

"Listen," I began at the same time, and we both stopped and waited. The music seemed louder than ever, just then, and even though I hadn't paid enough attention to hear a word all night, the lyrics seemed to suddenly jump out at me.

 _Every time I kiss you, girl, it tastes like pork and beans_ , Mick Jagger moaned, and I had to clap a hand over my mouth to keep from laughing in Steve's face. He broke out in a grin, the first real one I'd seen from him in a long time, and leaned heavily back against glass. The tension between us dissipated.

"Just for the record, you're bad at asking for things," he said, still grinning.

"Yeah, but I'm real good at getting them," I said, and pushed my way out into the crowd.

* * *

Boy, and I had thought things with Steve were awkward. Driving around in Steve's old souped-up Ford Falcon with Suzy Socialite was like getting bumped up to the majors. We had been doing ok up until we both got in the car, probably because we were both relieved to get out of Jay's, but as soon as the doors shut we lost any ground we might have gained, rapport-wise.

After about ten minutes of silence, other than occasional directions, I came out with:

"It's been awful cold lately."

"Yes," said Susanna. "I expect it will warm up soon, though."

"I guess so," I said, ever the brilliant conversationalist. "I heard it'll rain tomorrow."

"I heard that too," said Susanna.

I couldn't think of anything else to say. It was only about eleven o'clock, but it felt later. The silence in the car and the strangeness of the situation gave me that slightly surreal feeling you start to get around two or three in the morning.

Thinking about driving at two or three in the morning made me think about my parents, which made me ricochet around for a couple minutes, trying to think of anything else at all.

Susanna sat there with her back straight and her hands folded, pretty and awkward and stiff. Something about the way she was holding herself just then reminded me of my youngest brother.

"You like to read?" I asked.

"Yes," she said immediately. "I do. I like mysteries. At the moment I'm reading an Agatha Christie novel."

"Which one?" I said, like I knew any of the titles. I had started one once, but got too bored to finish it.

"A Caribbean Mystery. It's not the latest; it came out a few years ago. But the library didn't have it until recently, and my father thinks buying books is a waste, when the library is free."

"Not very capitalist of him," I said, before I thought.

"It is if you buy stocks instead," said Susanna. There was a slight sneer in her tone and I wasn't sure if it was directed at me or her father, and I couldn't really blame her either way.

I knew I was screwing it up. I was trying real hard to care. I knew I ought to be buttering her up, asking about whether she liked school and all that, leading up to the fact that I was a poor little orphan and gosh, no, I couldn't think of taking your money, Suze, _really_ , I couldn't take charity!

An image came to me, not quite a memory, of my father standing at the back door, sometime in autumn, looking out over the wilted garden. I couldn't think if he'd actually done that, but he must have at some time or other. How many years could you go in one house without looking out the back door, not doing anything, just standing there smoking while the sun went down?

My father was real big on not taking charity. My mother got boxes of canned beans from the church. Only one of those things kept our family fed, no matter how much bluster and bullshit went on about not taking handouts from anybody.

Only one of those things got funeral bills paid off.

I had a sudden desire to slam my head directly into the center of the steering wheel. I gripped tighter until it passed.

"Are you parents going to give you shit about coming home in a different car than you left in?" I asked.

"No, they won't. This is a nice car, anyway, much nicer than Billy's. His is awful on the inside, with bottles and things everywhere."

"Steve likes things clean," I said. I'd seen the room in the attic he shared with Gerry. It was a master class in minimalism.

"Is Steve your boyfriend?"

I caught myself before I winced. "No, he's my friend's brother. Hey, how'd a girl like Nancy get tangled up with Billy White, anyway? He must have told her some shit to get her to go out with him."

"I can't claim to understand it," Susanna said dryly. "She thinks he's putting on an act, you know, like he just says certain things to sound tough and all, and he doesn't really mean it. She says he's real sweet to her when it's just the two of them. I think that's a crock, personally."

"That would make you the smart one."

"Well, not really. Nancy's real smart about most things, just...not this. I don't know why."

"It's about power," I said. "If you think you have enough power to change a guy, make him better, then you feel like that makes up for all the ways you don't have power. At least that's my experience."

"I know," Susanna said softly. "I know. I just hate to think...she's smart, you know? She's my best friend."

"I get it," I said, and I did. Up until the year before I'd been joined at the hip with Margie Wilson, and then she started dating a guy who shoved her around, and when they broke up I talked all kinds of shit about him, and then they got back together and that was it for me and Margie. She wouldn't even look at me after that.

Susanna and I didn't look at each other either. I wondered if she was thinking about how to reel Nancy back in. How to keep her safe.

"Turn right up here. It's the third house on the left."

The house loomed up out of the darkness before us. It was all red brick, three stories high with dormer windows in what must have been the attic, if you can call a room that was probably nicer than my whole house an attic. There were two twenty foot pines on either side, and a line of oak saplings along to the left of the driveway. No lights were on. In the glare of the headlights it looked vaguely gothic.

"Your folks asleep already?" I said as I turned off the car.

"No, they're in Majorca,"

I turned fully toward her. "Spain?"

"Yeah. For a couple weeks." Susanna looked steadily down at her hands.

"You've got this whole place to yourself? Must be nice," I said lightly, trying to break up the gloom she was giving off that she very obviously did not want to talk about.

"Yeah. Mostly. My older sister is supposed to be staying here while she's on spring break, but she stays over with her boyfriend most nights. Hey, let me give you some money for gas. It isn't fair for you to come so far out of your way." She started fiddling around in her purse.

"No, that's ok," I said. "Don't worry about it. l couldn't take money, anyway."

"Oh, it's only fair, though. I ought to at least pay for gas."

I was after a lot more than gas money. "Look, I don't even pay for gas. My brother works at a DX, he has ever since our-"

I cut myself off and gripped the steering wheel so tight that my knuckles turned white under Susanna's curious eyes. It was only half acting. I was feeling pretty disgusted with myself, and had to force my eyes up to those attic windows. _A room nicer than my whole house._ I pictured it fiercely, brand new carpet, gauzy drapes, a big tv. I put in a minibar, just for the hell of it. A big modern couch I'd seen in a picture of Marilyn Monroe's house a few years back. Fuck, maybe a pet cheetah. Why not.

"Since my parents died," I finished quietly. Like I had just remembered. Like I'd been trying to forget.

Susanna's eyes were round with pity. I could feel it radiating off of her like heat.

"I'm sorry," she said, just as quietly, and in that moment I tried to hate her. I really did. But she sounded so sorry, and it was so dark in that driveway with the lights off and it felt so late. It felt like we were in another world. Just me and Susanna and absent parents. Majorca in the sky. I leaned my head back against the headrest and shut my eyes.

My breath was coming in short waves. I turned my head slightly and Susanna was there with her bright eyes overflowing. I didn't quite mean to, but I said out loud, "Do you ever feel like you're going to get in the car some day, and just drive until you hit the ocean? And not tell anyone, and just _go_?"

I watched the words move across her and settle. I saw something in her that I _knew_.

"All the damn time," she answered. "Oh- all the damn time. But-"

She stopped.

"Yeah," I said.

Light from a car turning down the street backlit her hair like the Madonna. I laughed. It sounded strange.

And just like that, she snapped back into herself, polite and sharp and a little too prim. "Well, thank you, I really do appreciate this. And you have to take this for gas. I won't take no. Goodbye," she said quickly, dropped a folded dollar bill onto the seat, and beat it out of there.

I watched her run up the walk to her empty house. I backed out and started driving.

After a minute, I picked up the dollar. It was folded around a twenty. More money than I could make in a week, anywhere.

I cussed all the way home.


	5. Chapter 5

March 6th, 1965

* * *

Curfew, such as it was, was one in the morning on weekends. I rolled up to our porch around 12:55, stomped around a little, and sat down on the steps to smoke a cigarette.

At exactly 1:02, Darrel yanked the front door open.

"You know you're not proving anything when you do this," he snapped.

"I don't do it for myself," I said, tilting my head back until he loomed upside down in the doorway. "It's a public service. If I don't remind you that I cooperate by choice your head would get too big to fit through the door. Any door. They'd have to remodel every building in town, do you have any idea what that would cost?"

"You know what? Stay out there." Darrel shut the door, and half a second later I heard the lock click. I laughed out loud and stubbed my cigarette out on the porch rail.

From our mid-teens up until our parent's death, Darry and I mostly tried to avoid being on different teams. Years of experience, coupled with his inability to punch me, had taught us that everything went smoother that way.

It seemed like half of my childhood was spent looking up at my mother standing over the stove, hands busy, hair frizzing, ignoring both our arguments about who was at fault for whatever we'd broken or torn or fallen out of that particular hour. _You two_ , she would shake her head and glower at us, _came out of one flour bin. Same measure of stubborn, same measure of smart. Wish you'd use those brains for something worthwhile._

I walked around the house and went in through the back. Darry was sitting at the kitchen table clipping coupons. He didn't look up when I walked in.

There was a time in my life where I would have given anything for photographic evidence of the Boy of the Year clipping coupons. There was a time in my life when I would have laughed him out of the house.

As it was, I sat down across from him and started looking for deals.

After a moment, I said, "I'm keeping a list for Miss Darby, you know. Neglect. Endangerment. Intentional freezing."

"Can't hang me twice," Darrel said dryly, but his expression softened a little at the mention of our social worker.

Miss Darby was not particularly beautiful, but she had a significant amount of charisma and charm. Significant enough to make every single one of my brothers fall in love with her about five minutes after she walked into our living room the first time. She wasn't too old- I'd guess mid-twenties- and she was straightforward enough for Darry, sweet enough for Soda, and friendly enough for Ponyboy. She had a genuine, _I believe in you boys_ smile that went straight through them, and her manner of helping felt more neighborly than official. She was like that teacher in Anne of Green Gables that never had any trouble with her kids because they all wanted to please her out of affection.

We didn't get along. I wanted to, and she wanted to, but every time we tried to talk it was like I left my body and Two-Bit hopped in instead, and I floated around and watched myself act like a jackass and try to smart off enough that everyone would stop what they were talking about and just laugh instead.

It never worked.

I looked at Darry out of the corner of my eye. He looked beat. There were dark half moons under his eyes, and he had a vaguely haggard look that would have been a lot easier to see if he'd been out on a bender, instead of roofing all day and budgeting all night.

I needed to get a job. I needed regular money coming in every week, not just dumb hustles that would only work once. I needed to quit goofing around after school and start contributing. I made up my mind right then to go back to Jay's the next day and ask Jay, not Ellen, for a job.

"Where you been?" Darry asked after a minute, his tone so decidedly casual that I rolled my eyes. But he was looking steadily at the coupons, and very pointedly not making any implications about what else I might have done at Buck's or how stupid I was in general, and I knew it was as close to a peace offering as he was going to get. I took it.

"Jay's," I said, just as casually. "Where are the boys?"

"Soda's out at the Wallace place for a poker game, Pony's in bed."

Something about the way he said it reminded me so much of a father listing off the locations of his children that I rocked back in my chair, rocked back on the hind legs and closed my eyes. When I opened them Darrel was glaring at me and I knew just by looking at him that he was holding back the desire to tell me to sit right, and that he was holding it back because my mother had said it so many times that we could both hear her voice like she was sitting there between us, like she was standing under the clock pushing her shoulder blades against the wall. Rolling out the kink in her neck. The bottle blond hair that looked so good in the sunlight exposed in the dim light of the kitchen for what it was.

I rocked forward hard and slammed the chair legs down. "Wanna go get stoned?"

Darry set the scissors down and gave me a look of pure exasperation. "Why do you have to act this way? What's wrong with you?"

"Same thing that's wrong with you, dumbass," I said immediately, and caught the flicker of anger that meant a hit hand landed. I hadn't really meant to hit, though. "Ok, I'm sorry, you're very smart."

"I'm flattered," he said flatly, picking up the scissors again. "The school called."

"Soda?" It had to be, since I hadn't done anything particularly interesting that week, and Pony never got in trouble at school.

"Yeah."

He didn't elaborate, so I said, "I went to the library yesterday to look at parenting books, but it was all about babies and little kids. And one about a school in England where they let the kids make all the rules."

That had actually been pretty interesting, but it wasn't exactly applicable to our situation. Except that it was our exact situation.

Darry snorted. "That's the dumbest thing I ever heard. They trying to recreate Lord of the Flies?"

"Well, well. Look who perused the banned books list."

"He's failing. I don't what to do. It's not like it's a matter of intelligence, because he's plenty smart, and it's not a matter of motivation, because I know he tries."

He paused, and I heard what he wasn't saying, which was that he was starting to think maybe some people just aren't cut out for it, maybe Soda quitting school wasn't such a bad idea.

Under the table, my hands clenched together. "You can't get any kind of career without a degree. And soon it's gonna be a-"

I stopped myself before I said college degree, because I might as well have kicked Darry in the throat.

He knew anyway, of course.

We didn't look at each other. "Sorry."

He ignored that. "Mom should of let him go to vocational school."

All Soda had ever wanted, as long as I could remember, was to ride horses and work on cars. All my mother had ever wanted was to make him follow Darry down the path of working his way through college. Which was a stupid dream, in my opinion, made only stupider by the guilt clutching at my throat. I was the only woman left in the family. She would have wanted me to see it through. She would have held me responsible for the boys, because in my mother's world, women were what stood between men and chaos.

I cleared my throat. My chest was on fire. "Give it a couple months. It might get better. He's had trouble focusing on any one thing since- well, it might get better, with time. He wouldn't be the first kid to get held back. Hell, look at Two-Bit."

"If he gets held back he and Pony will be in the same grade next year," Darrel said. "How do you see that going?"

"Maybe it'll make him try harder," I said, which was dumb, so I accepted the look Darry gave me. We both knew Soda was motivated by praise and praise alone. I didn't exactly see his teachers rising to the occasion, given his current grades. Soda was a charmer, but he had always goofed off so much in class that teachers tended to dislike him. None of us had made it to school much in January, but Soda was the only one who got any shit about it.

"Can you and Soda get groceries tomorrow? I'm taking Pony to the doctor in the afternoon."

"Sure. We'll go to Cooley's. There's a sale on flank steak."

Darrel set the scissors down in irritation and glared at me as he swept his hand across the coupons. "These are all for Reasor's."

Which of course was my fault, what with me being the person in charge of distributing coupons to every house in the neighborhood.

"They'll still be good next weekend. We can't keep serving pasta and bread every other night. There has to be meat, and Cooley's has the cheapest meat in town tomorrow." I'd forgotten about the twenty in my pocket.

"Fine. Do we have seeds for corn and squash?"

I looked up, surprised. "What, already?"

"She always planted in March."

"Ok." I wanted to ask if he'd sent a check to the funeral home, but I couldn't bring myself to do it just then. "I don't think so. We'll swing by the hardware store. What else is on the list?"

"I don't know. Probably Mrs. Engleman."

I groaned. Emma Engleman was the the reigning director of the Ladies Ministries at First Baptist, and she called at nine o'clock on the first Saturday of every month to let us know that she and her Ministering Angels were going to clean the house that afternoon whether we liked it or not. Darrel, like all Curtis men before him, did not have ability to turn aside old well-meaning bulldozers in floral dresses, and mumbling protests while the back of his neck turned red only spurred Engleman on to greater heights of charity.

Not that I fared much better. Engleman was damn hard to put off; she was completely immune to sarcasm and had none of the fear of smirking teenage greasers that kept the rest of the Ladies Ministries at arm's length.

"You think she'll still come if we don't answer the phone?"

Darry laughed. "Wanna bet on it?"

"Maybe I can convince her we sold the house. Or all got arrested at the same time."

"Or we joined a new church," Darry muttered.

I snapped my fingers at him. That one might actually work. "You're a genius."

The clunky snap of the TV turning on in the living room took both of us by surprise. Pony could be a damn ghost when he wanted to, and neither of us had heard him come down the hallway. I wondered how long he'd been in there and if he'd heard anything we'd been saying about Soda. Darry went into the living room, presumably to ask him if he'd been dreaming about good grades. Something about interacting with our youngest brother turned Darrel into a hit 45 single- Side A, Get Good Grades; Side B, Keep Getting Good Grades.

"What are you doin' up, kiddo?"

Pony mumbled something I couldn't quite make out about not being able to sleep. I got up and shouldered my way past Darry into the living room, where our youngest brother was scrunched into the corner of the couch like there were three other people on it, long hair flopping into his face. Darrel leaned against the door jamb and chewed on his lower lip, and I stood there awkwardly with my hands on my hips, and for about a full minute the room was silent except for the frantic music under the closing credits of whatever ancient movie was on TV.

Eventually Pony looked up from under his hair and said, "Do you think anyone ever went back a grade, after skipping one?"

"Only if they flunked," Darry said, and then the thought went through him like a jolt of electricity and he started to step forward, then stopped himself. " _Are you_ -"

I cut him off. "How could he possibly be suddenly failing, right now, at two in the morning? You check his grades _every day."_

Pony shrank further into himself, hunching his shoulders up and staring at his hands.

"What's the problem, then?" said Darrel.

Pony very obviously did not want to answer the question, and very obviously did not feel like he could say _nothing, never mind, go away_. He looked like he wanted to turn a faded orange and green plaid and meld swiftly and completely with the couch. You would think the kid had been kidnapped by complete strangers who were interrogating him through torture.

I didn't really get what the big deal was. It was just a question.

"I guess it's just weird, bein' the youngest one in my grade," Pony said to his hands, and a little shot of sympathy went through me. He was kind of little for his age, after all, and I couldn't imagine that was much fun for a boy even if they were in the right grade. Pony somehow managed to inherit our mother's height, unlike the rest of us. Darry, Soda, and I had all been the tallest kids in our classes by a solid margin up until junior high.

"Why?" said Darry, who had always been tall and strong and admired, and probably never considered his brothers might be anything else.

Pony shrugged.

"Kids givin' you guff about it?" I asked. I saw Darry quirk his eyebrows at the word guff and had to resist the urge to flip him off. If anxiety made him harass the kid about grades it could make me talk like a gangster in an old timey movie, that was only fair.

"No," said Pony. Well, there went that theory.

The music ended and the room went completely silent.

Darry gave me a look that said _do something_ as clearly as if he'd painted it on the wall. _Like what,_ I telegraphed back, and Darry made a complicated hand motion that was halfway between _you're female, do feminine comforting_ and _you're an idiot and I'm going to kill you._

" _You're_ the idiot, and you're welcome to try," I hissed back.

"What?" said Pony.

" _What_?" said Darry.

"Nothing, shut up." I patted Pony tentatively on the shoulder. He looked at me like I was insane.

"School is dumb," I said in my most comforting tones.

Darry shot me a venomous look. "School's important, and you should be proud of bein' the youngest kid in your class. It just means you're smart. Smart enough to know that if you ever want to get anywhere you have to keep your grades up."

"He _already does_ , moron, what do want him to do, move into the biology lab? Actually, that would free up some space, Pony, if you're interested in a change of address."

Pony continued to look at me like I was insane.

"It would be crowded in the daytime, sure," I continued blithely. "But think of all the freedom you'd have at night."

Pony snorted, and the left corner of his mouth tilted upward. I took that as a victory and grinned at Darrel, who glared back at me, evidently unsatisfied.

I smirked at him and said brightly to Pony, "Look on the bright side, kid. If it gets too bad, you can always just drop out. Plenty of people-"

"You're an idiot and I'm going to kill you," said Darry.

"Ha!" I jabbed a finger at him triumphantly.

"I'm gonna go back to bed," Pony muttered, and got up off the couch.

He shuffled off down the hallway, and as soon as his bedroom door closed Darrel slumped back against the wall and shut his eyes.

I shared his sentiments. I flopped down onto the couch, somehow more exhausted after having a useless conversation with a thirteen year old than I'd been all week. "Well, I think we knocked that one out of the park."

Darry put his face in his hands. "Did you borrow that book about the kids that run their own school?"

"Nope."

"I don't get that kid."

I didn't really get him either. He was always clamming up around me and Darry, like we hadn't known him his entire life. He talked Soda's ear off.

"Well, maybe you should wig out about his grades more often. That seems to be workin' wonders."

"Maybe you should make more smartass remarks," Darry snapped. "It really helps everybody out."

"Oh, you know me," I said wearily. "The Sultan of Solace."

"You said it, not me." Darry said, but he laughed for real. So I took that as a victory too, and chucked a pillow at him. He caught it easily and tossed it back onto the other end of the couch.

"Seriously, though," I said, "do you think he's havin' trouble at school?"

He grimaced slightly. Pony, as the youngest, had always had a tendency to exaggerate things for attention. It worked like a charm with our parents, especially our mom. And when they were alive we had no problems accusing him of it even when he wasn't doing it, but now that they were dead, it felt ugly to even mention. To even think about.

"I guess so," said Darry, jamming his hands in his pockets like he always did when he was uncomfortable. "I don't know what to tell him, though. I'm more concerned about-"

He stopped himself before mentioning the nightmares, and I looked away and tried not to think about the horrific sound of a child screaming in terror because he kept seeing his parents die over and over again. Tried to pretend I had never heard that sound.

It was a hell of a lot easier to think about trouble at school.

"Lynn Adderson got put up a grade, remember? He was always real popular," I said. "Maybe he just needs to do more stuff socially."

"Yeah, maybe so. He didn't go out tonight. Just like last weekend, and the weekend before that." Darrel ran a hand across the side of his face and up into his hair and sighed. "Shit, I didn't think of that before. He's turnin' into a hermit."

"Claudette Altera's having a party next weekend. Me and Soda are both going, maybe we can talk him into that."

"You don't mind takin' him?"

"Nah, there'll be a lot of kids from his year there. Claudette's got a sister his age." I slid off the couch and onto the floor, put my face against the carpet and closed my eyes. "And her mother's a lush. We'll all get smashed and bring you back a bottle of girliest liquor we can find."

"Bring me back a different sister," Darry suggested as he went past me back into the kitchen.

"And deflate your little football of a heart? I couldn't dream of it," I called after him.

He came back in with his hands full of papers from the kitchen table, destined for his dresser drawers, and stopped to kick the bottom of my foot. "Don't fall asleep here. I'm goin' to bed. Goodnight, wiseass."

"You know hiding those in your bureau doesn't do any good, right?"

"Let's have the decency to pretend you've never snooped through my underwear, huh? Just for tonight."

I clicked my heels together and saluted. Darry picked the pillow up off the couch and dropped it on my face, and then retreated down the hall before I could retaliate. I got up and headed down into the basement to go to bed.

I'd shared a room with Darry until he turned ten and my mother decided he was too old for it and had me switch places with Soda. I lasted about twenty minutes sharing a room with four year old Pony, and then I moved my stuff down into the basement instead.

My parents weren't too thrilled about it. My dad worried about mice and my mother worried that the furnace noises would freak me out, but I loved the basement, honestly. I liked the low light and the relative privacy and the feeling of being underneath the rest of the house; it felt like I had a secret cave, like batman. When I was little I would lie in bed and pretend there was a real batcave underneath me, which featured heavily in the crime-solving stories I would tell myself before I fell asleep.

My dad had intended to cover the cinder blocks with faux wood paneling, but true to form, he only finished one before losing interest. So one wall was paneled, two were painted red- a choice my brothers liked to use as evidence that my room was the mouth of hell- and one was a pretty mild blue that I had tried out when I was fourteen and never got around to re-painting. I had a couple travel posters up on the blue wall, and the outlines of a mural of birds that I never finished.

A disadvantage to basement life was that I could hear every time someone took a single step overhead, and my brothers weren't exactly dainty ballerinas in the first place. And I never could fall or stay asleep easily, so every time someone got up to get a drink or go to the bathroom, I woke up.

So when Soda came through the front door about an hour later, I heard him. I heard his shoes hit the floor when he flung them halfway across the living room, and the arrhythmic shuffle of his feet moving unsteadily toward the couch. I heard him give up that particular goal and hit the floor like sack of cement, and the low mumble of laughter like thunder in the distance.

I rolled out of bed and cussed my way up the stairs, albeit quietly. I didn't want to wake Pony.

Darry met me in the hall. We didn't say anything to each other. We didn't have to. He veered off into the kitchen to start a pot of coffee, and I went over to where my drunk brother was lying face down on the floor behind the couch, arms sprawled out on either side like Jesus on the cross, grinning at the floorboards. He didn't move when I stopped beside him.

Soda, when drunk, was a study in stillness. He could lie so still you'd think he was dead. Alcohol flipped off the switch in his brain that kept him in constant motion when he was sober. The change was staggering, although I don't know if it was the change itself or the shock of actually noticing it. Soda's incessant foot-jiggling and finger tapping was always just background noise, something I never really saw or thought about until it stopped so completely.

I nudged his arm with my bare toe. "Mornin', sunshine."

The arm didn't move, but his hand opened and closed again in what could have passed for a wave.

"Have a nice time at the eagle scout meeting?"

"You know it," he murmured. "You have fun with bitchy rich?"

"Does she already merit a flattering nickname? It's Susanna, actually."

"Yeah? Where'd she get to?"

"A beautiful foreign land where everyone is sober all the time."

He rolled onto his side, voice wry, eyes closed, expression catatonic. "That's what you think. Me n'her, we do this all time when you're not around. She's a real boozehound. They call her...boozin' Susan."

Darrel came in with a mug and set it down on the coffee table. He looked briefly at Soda and then his eyes traveled all around the floor, and it took me a second to realize he was looking for keys. I looked out the front window for the truck, hoping to God it wasn't there. It wasn't.

"Truck's not here," I said over my shoulder. "How'd you get home?"

"Stoner," said Soda, referring to Gil Stoner, which at any other time would have been bad news.

"Don't think you're in any condition to be makin' accusations," Darry muttered, and sat down in the easy chair. "Think you can crawl your way over to the couch, there, buddy?"

"Hey, hey, you're a funny guy, you know that, Darry?"

"Yeah," Darrel said darkly. "You know what isn't funny?"

"Pope in a Volkswagon," Soda said without opening his eyes, and I laughed. A slow grin rolled across Soda's lifeless face like the sun coming up, and Darry narrowed his eyes at me and tried not to grin. But you could tell something in Soda's expression relieved him, somehow. Like they were back on familiar ground.

But then the grin disappeared and Soda opened his eyes and looked blearily up at me, and he looked so sad and sick that I just knew he was going to say something awful. And I didn't look at Darrel, because I didn't want to see him see it too. But I heard him sigh.

"Somethin' else ain't funny," Soda said slowly, mirthlessly. "Hey Darry, you're the smart guy, how do you spell 'hypocrite'?"

All the air went out of the room.

I knelt down next to Soda and stared at him until he met my eyes.

"Hey, Pepsi-Cola," I said, real gently so he would know I was serious. "I know you're real sad and drunk and all, but if you start givin' Darry shit I'm gonna put you on the fuckin' lawn."

Soda closed his eyes. One finger waggled slightly. "Language."

"Young gentleman, verily I shall cast thee out into the cold, and thy nethers shall freeze right off."

He laughed at that. "Ok, all right. You got it, chief. I'm sorry, Dar. I didn't mean it. I don't mean anything, ever." He laughed again, but this time it was hollow and bitter. This time it sounded like our father.

"Come on," I grabbed his limp hand, and he more or less got himself up off the floor and over onto the couch.

"Coffee," Soda said softly, once he was sprawled across the couch, his feet all the way off the end. I thought of the way Pony had been hunched into the corner of it earlier.

"Nah," Darry said, just as softly. "Sleep it off, kid."

"Ain't a kid," Soda grumbled, and Darry and I grinned briefly at each other over his head. But then Darry's face went back into that terrible expression halfway between fear and sorrow, anxiety and anger, and I couldn't look at him anymore. I could never look at him long when Soda was drunk.

Soda yawned hugely and cracked one eye open. "Shit, I can't sleep. I ain't slept it...days, feels like. Can you do a poem?"

"Soda." Darry's voice was a crater. The impact was long gone and all that was left was smoke and dirt and a hole in the ground.

I waved him off. I tried to say that it was ok, it was alright, but my mouth stayed shut, somehow. I tried to tear my eyes away from the warp and weft of the couch cushions, orange and green sliding into brown, forever, eternally, even after we were all dead and it was in a dump or an attic somewhere. Some things last forever.

My mother couldn't sing for shit, but she had a beautiful speaking voice.

"Do it like she used to, Carrie," Soda whispered into his arms. "Please."

I cleared my throat. I tried to imagine I was swallowing honey and tea and cinnamon and did my best impression of her, although is it an impression if it isn't funny, is it an impression if your lungs crack apart in your chest and all the air just _goes._

"On either side the river lie  
Long fields of barley and of rye,  
That clothe the wold and meet the sky;  
And thro' the field the road runs by  
To many-tower'd Camelot;  
And up and down the people go,  
Gazing where the lilies blow  
Round an island there below,  
The island of Shalott..."

He was asleep before I reached the second stanza.


	6. Chapter 6

CW: casual use of a homophobic slur. The beliefs and language of the characters do not reflect the beliefs of the author.

* * *

The secret to not having nightmares is to not sleep.

After Soda passed out, I went downstairs and read about half of Little Town on the Prairie. I read until I couldn't keep my eyes open anymore, and then two hours later my alarm went off and I woke up and read some more.

It wasn't exactly challenging literature, but just then all I wanted was the books I had loved best throughout my childhood. I guess I was trying to find some comfort in the things that had made me happiest in the past, or get back that old ability to lose myself in them so completely that I forgot everything else. I'd forgotten how to do that, somehow.

I had also forgotten that in the beginning of Anne of Green Gables, she's an orphan who's been basically enslaved all her life, and not even the Cuthberts want her. I had forgotten that Farmer Boy starts with a story about a teacher who was beaten to death by the oldest students for the sheer fun of it.

Had I missed all this darkness somehow, when I was a kid? Had I been too young to process the horror of it, or are kids just better equipped to accept horrible things?

By the time the sun rose I had finished the book and wasn't really tired enough to go back to sleep, so I headed upstairs and outside to see if the paper had come yet. Steve was sitting on the front steps smoking when I walked out. He turned and looked up at me standing there in my faded pink bathrobe, and I wondered if he saw his or my mother twenty years in reverse. If I'd had curlers in I could have fit right in with every other middle aged woman in the neighborhood. The thought made me vaguely nauseous, although that might just have been the shock of the cold.

"You're gonna freeze to death out here," I said, picking up the paper. "Why didn't you come in?"

He shrugged. His hair was as greased up as ever, but sometime during the night the swirling pattern that he preferred had gotten mussed beyond recognition. It was pushed back straight off his forehead like he'd run his hand through it.

I leaned against the door frame and looked down the street. There was a gray and white cat I'd never seen before meandering up the sidewalk.

"Ellis?" I didn't look at him when I said it.

"Yep," he said. Underneath his brown denim jacket, his shoulders went tense and tight.

Ellis Randle was a piece of work. He got along great with his sons until they lost interest in boy scout shit, and then he got weird. He accused them of being rebellious and disrespectful every time they opened their mouths, he threatened to call the cops if they goofed off in school, and if they were late for curfew he told them to get out and never come back. Then the next day or so after a blow up he tried to pretend none of it happened, and if they didn't go along with it he tried to buy them off. It was a quick way to make a couple bucks, but it wasn't worth it.

Four houses down, Bertha Cade rolled up in an old beat-to-hell Chevy. I knew she worked the night shift at a little factory out in Broken Arrow, but I'd never been outside early enough to see her come home from work before. She looked like hell. She looked so sad just gathering up her things to go inside that I couldn't imagine what it was like when she was actually sad. But hell, maybe she already was.

I nudged Steve in the back with my toe. "You wanna help me make biscuits?"

"What?" He twisted around to look at me.

"Not an innuendo, I swear. Real biscuits. The kind you eat."

"What would it even be an innuendo _for_?"

"Gettin' knocked up with twins?"

Steve snorted. "I don't think there's a position that guarantees that."

"Yeah, but you don't know. It's not like they've done studies."

"I think word would get around," Steve said as he got to his feet. "What the hell, let's make biscuits."

I got out the eggs and butter while he took off his jacket and slung it over a kitchen chair. Steve wasn't husky or bulky or anything, just your average awkward wiry teenage greaser like my brothers, but I did notice the lean muscles of his forearms when he was rolling dough next to me. Boys forearms always kind of fascinated me, the way they weren't that much thicker than girls but seemed to hold so much more physical strength. It was interesting in an annoying way.

It got quiet. The kitchen clock ticked, and maybe down the hall Soda or Pony rolled over and hit the wall with a dull _thud,_ but that was it. I started to feeling antsy, wanting to look over at Steve too much, wanting to say something that wasn't dumb, but I couldn't seem to think of anything. It wasn't as bad as me and Susanna, at least. I took comfort in that.

"How'd it go last night?" Steve asked suddenly, like he could read my mind. "With that girl?"

"Good. Made a couple bucks. Still need a job, though."

"You ought to try Jay instead of Ellen. I bet he'd let you work there."

"Yeah."

Welp, that was it. Silence again. I knew the boys would start waking up when the scent of the biscuits baking started to fill the house, but that seemed like it would take an hour instead of ten minutes. I dug deep.

"Ever made biscuits before?" Wow, a real hot topic. I would have rolled my eyes at myself if it would have done me any good. "Roll those in butter before you put them on the sheet."

"Okay. Nah, Ellis would flip shit. He says the only guys who cook are in the army or little French fags."

"How nice for Clara and Ronda." Clara had to cook full time to keep all those boys fed, and I knew Ronda was always hiding out so as not to get conscripted, but I had never thought to ask why her brothers couldn't help. My mom had always been able to pull one of my brothers in to chop or boil or fry something. Hell, the biscuit recipe was my dad's, even. He was the one who got up early on Saturday mornings to bake them and fry eggs.

"Yeah, he's a charmer," Steve said dryly.

"Yep."

We put the biscuits in the oven and stood around not looking at each other for a few minutes, and then Steve cleared his throat and I looked at him and he said: "You wanna go to the movies next weekend?"

I nearly spit out my orange juice. "What, like a date?"

He shrugged. "Not really. I told Pony and Johnny I'd drive them, and Soda's busy."

"Okay," I said, not really sure if I should be offended or relieved. Or anything.

"So where'd that girl live?" Steve asked.

I told him. He grinned as I described the house, including the leopard print furniture I imagined, and whistled when I told him her parents were in Spain.

"Shit, my parents wouldn't leave the house for a single night," he said incredulously.

"Yeah, but Susanna and her sister ain't gonna burn the place to the ground in the first five minutes of bein' left alone."

He grinned at me. "You got a point there."

Sure enough, as soon as the biscuits were cooked through Soda and Pony woke up and came thundering in, Soda acting like last night had never happened, Pony acting like I was the one who had been drunk and disorderly and should therefore be ignored. Soon Two-Bit was there too. Steve shifted a little when they came in, got a little more sarcastic, slouched so he would look tougher. Why boys feel like they need to put a show on for each other is beyond me, but I guess girls do it too. I don't really think about what _boys_ will say when I wear a short skirt or a low cut top.

Steve wanted me to tell everybody about Susanna's house when they came in, but I started to feel a little bit bad about gossiping about her after she'd given me all that money. I still let him play it up and make a big deal about me being a chauffeur for rich girls now, and I felt a little bit bad about that too.

If I had known then what it was going to come to, I would have kept my big mouth shut in the first place. I never would have told anybody at all.

* * *

Jay was a thin man in his sixties, tall and broad-shouldered. We'd gone to the same church my whole life and I had no idea what his actual name was. Everyone, including the preacher, just called him Jay, which was almost certainly his first name but was just probable enough as a last to keep us guessing. By us I mean me and Pony, the only people in the family curious enough to care.

He eyed me stoically as I walked up to the counter, giving zero indication that he'd known me since I was a kid.

"Good morning," I said brightly.

"Every morning that a man can rise from his bed is a good one," said Jay.

I did not ask him what constituted a good morning for women.

"I'd like to apply for a job," I said, as nicely as possible.

Jay frowned. "Can you cook?"

Not for shit.

"Yes," I said. "My mother taught me."

Jay wore the extremely dubious expression of one who had sampled my mother's dishes at church potlucks. I wore the politely menacing expression of one daring a man to question the cooking of a deceased Southern woman.

"I seem to recall that she was a good cook," said Jay, who was not a rebel at heart. I smiled benevolently at him.

"Yes sir."

"Not a full time job, I hope?" said Jay, lowering his eyebrows at me.

"No, sir. After school and on weekends."

"I'm glad to hear it. The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet. Do you know who said that?"

I literally bit my tongue. The pain helped me focus. _Regular money. Money every week._ I shook my head.

"Take a guess," Jay challenged. Evidently my reputation preceded me, with regards to answers that were not always strictly earnest. Jay folded his arms and waited.

Don't say Donald Duck, I thought furiously. Don't say Jayne Mansfield. _Don't say Jesus._

I took a breath. "Eleanor Roosevelt?"

"Aristotle," Jay said.

"Never heard of him," I said, as a consolation prize. Jay regarded me sternly. I cleared my throat and backpedaled. "Oh, wait, yes I have. He was... Greek."

"He tutored Alexander the Great," Jay said darkly. "Perhaps you've heard of him?"

The only man in the world to name a city after his horse, when he wasn't naming them after himself. I did not trust myself to answer correctly and nodded silently.

It was not often that Jay had a teenage audience that was unable to ignore him or smart off or wander away, and he clearly intended to take full advantage of it.

"What do they teach you kids these days? You should be learning the classics. Every one of our forefathers had a classical education, and look at them. Now look around here some night and tell me you see the next George Washington or Thomas Jefferson."

"Can't argue with that," I said wearily.

"It's hard to argue with a classical education. For more reasons than one. You should all be studying the Organon. If we had more people teaching Logic in schools, I wouldn't need a shotgun to break up fights."

Right, because Alexander the Great calmly argued his way across Asia Minor. Yes sir, excellent point sir. My neck started getting sore from all the nodding.

But it paid off.

"Well, I guess we could use you after school and on Saturdays," Jay said, scratching his chin. "In the back, I mean. Not waiting tables. Ellen likes to do that."

I never would have guessed in a million years. "Thank you."

I knew I should feel glad about it, and grateful, but as soon as he said it I felt like a door was closing on me. There went all my afternoons and most of my weekends, for the price of sixty five cents an hour. There went hanging out with Ronda and goofing off with other kids. But also, hopefully, there went the letters from the funeral home. _Regular money. Money every week._ I had to keep my eye on what I was really doing there. I had to shut up and stop complaining about it.

"You can start Monday," Jay said. "And by the way, Caroline, just so you know- if you want to keep this job, you can't have a smart mouth. Ellen won't have it."

Great. The perfect situation for me.


End file.
